Holyoke, Massachusetts, April 29, 2019 – Reflecting a national trend of increased collaboration between industry and high performance computing centers, three Massachusetts-based biotechnology companies have engaged the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) to enable their leading-edge work, the MGHPCC announced today.
“Science and engineering today rely on high performance computing. Our mission is to support scientific and engineering advances as well as the state’s innovation economy by enabling computationally intensive research across academia, government and the private sector,” said John Goodhue, the Executive Director of the MGHPCC.
The companies using the MGHPCC include Boston-based Silicon Therapeutics, the first fully integrated physics-driven drug discovery company; IOMICS, an innovative life science analytics company headquartered in Cambridge; and Curoverse, a Somerville-based unit of Veritas Genetics dedicated to building open source technology to accelerate health care’s transformation to a more predictive personalized and precise model.
“Computing is central to our physics-driven drug discovery efforts at Silicon Therapeutics,” said Vipin Sachdeva, Associate Director and Head of High Performance Computing at Silicon Therapeutics. “Since our inception, MGHPCC has proved to be pivotal in addressing the computing needs of our growing organization. They have demonstrated excellence across the board in our interactions with them and we are excited to continue to expand our HPC infrastructure at the MGHPCC.”
“The MGHPCC has emerged as one of the Commonwealth’s most important resources for the 21st Century,” said Joseph Gormley, Chief Technology Officer, and Senior Software Architect at IOMICS. “The center has been a catalyst for multiple commercial-academic collaborations and has been instrumental in the development of our award-winning life science analytics products and services.”
In addition to the MGHPCC’s partnerships with companies such as Silicon Therapeutics, IOMICS and Curoverse, the founding universities of the MHGPCC collaborate with a wide range of commercial enterprises through joint initiatives such as the Center for Data Science at UMass Amherst, which is creating new technology to manage and gain insight from big data while also educating tomorrow’s data scientists, and the Mass Open Cloud, a partnership led by Boston University to create a new model of cloud computing that allows academic researchers and technology companies to innovate in ways that are not currently possible with commercial clouds.
These partnerships reflect a national trend of increased collaboration and scientific knowledge transfer between industrial users and public high performance computing centers, according to a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and conducted by Hyperion Research (formerly the IDC HPC Group) for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“This study represents the increased awareness and importance of HPC centers and industry collaborations, and the recognition that these partnerships need to be better understood,” said Bill Kramer, Senior Associate Director, Blue Waters Project Office of the NCSA. “One of the most interesting observations to me is that the industrial partners and centers both value the HPC expertise that centers provide to the industrial project as much as the actual computing/analysis system access.”
About the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center
The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) provides state-of-the-art infrastructure for computationally intensive research that is indispensable in the increasingly sensor and data-rich environments of modern science and engineering. Computers at the MGHPCC run millions of virtual experiments every month, supporting thousands of researchers in Massachusetts and around the world. The MGHPCC was developed through an unprecedented collaboration among the most research-intensive universities in Massachusetts (Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts); the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and private industry (Cisco and Dell EMC). The member universities fund the ongoing operation of the data center, which is open for use by any research organization.
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